Language and Gender (also known
as ‘Gender and Language’ or ‘Feminist Linguistics’) is a relatively new
field within sociolinguistics,
usually said to be marked by the publication of Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s
Place in 1975. Two aspects emerged in
language and gender research; first, how women and men talked (and by extension,
wrote), and second, how women/men/boys and girls were represented in language –
as a code, as discourse, and in actual texts.
‘Gender’ has now stabilized as a
term to distinguish people in terms of their socio-cultural behavior, and to
signify masculine and feminine behaviors as scales or continua rather than as a
dichotomy (Holmes 2001).
History of the area
There were three field in recent
decades: variationist, and more particularly, ‘interactional’ research. The
latter is characterized by a range of theoretical perspectives: deficiency,
dominance, cultural difference and social constructionism.
Variationist studies
Classic variationist studies
looked for evidence of sex-preferential speech in large-scale English-speaking
populations such as New York, Detroit, Norwich, the Wirral, Belfast and Sydney.
Traditional variationist studies conceptualize ‘sex’ as a fixed and universal
variable determining people’s use of language alongside other equally key
categories such as class, age and ethnicity. Variationist research on gender
today can be more aptly described as ‘sociolinguistic’.
Interactional studies
This study focused on the
distinctively gendered ways in which people interact in various social and
professional contexts. Three early but still highly influential theories (deficit,
dominance, difference) all emphasized the notion of a gender dichotomy.
Deficit theory
Lakoff’s (1975) ‘deficit’ theory
posited that from an early age, girls are taught how to use a separate ‘woman’s
language’: they are socialized to use language in a ‘ladylike’ way.
Dominance theory
Lakoff’s (1975) thesis that women
constructed their own subordination through their language use was a forerunner
of ‘dominance’ theory. This had two distinct, parallel branches: language as
social interaction, which considered how gender inequalities were constructed
through routine interactions between men and women, and language as a system
focusing on ‘sexism’ within the language.
Spender (1980) She noted three
further ways in which the language sustains this andro-centric perspective:
1. linguistic
marking of terms to denote women (e.g. manageress, stewardess),
2. semantic
derogation (the way terms for women like mistress have become ‘derogated’ or
debased over time; also see Schulz 1990),
3. lexical
gaps (the lack of a woman-centred lexis to describe certain female experiences
in positive ways, such as childlessness or remaining a single woman).
Cultural difference theory
Coates (1988)
argued that women’s talk should be ‘re-valued’ in much more positive ways by
feminist linguists as different but equal, as complementary to men’s, not deficient.
Main current issues
Social constructionism and the ‘post-modern turn’
Social constructionist theory
(e.g. Bergvall et al. 1996; Butler 1990; Crawford 1995; also see Norton, this
volume) suggests that males and females are not born, or even simply socialized
into a pre-fixed gender identity, but they become gendered through their
interactions. According to this view, individuals don’t have gender, they do
gender through repeated behavioral and linguistic interactions. This
post-modern perspective argues that males and females do not have an individual
essence, character or ‘core’ (Crawford 1995); there are no intrinsic male or
female characteristics, only ones that are brought into being through repeated
bodily or linguistic actions.
Gender and sexuality
The focus of much recent ‘gender
and sexuality’ research has been upon ‘hetero-normativity’, the system that naturalizes
and rewards a particular kind of heterosexuality – complementary, monogamous
and reproductive male/ female partnerships – as the basis for a stable society.
The salience of gender
Such participants need to refer
to their own or other people’s gender specifically (for example, by terms such
as ‘women’, ‘ladies’, ‘mothers-in-law’, etc.) within an observed conversation
as evidence of their orientation to this category. Holmes suggests that there
is evidence from a range of social contexts that women are still discriminated
against and that this discrimination works at both a local level through
people’s interactions, but also less visibly at a structural level through
institutional and state practices.
Future trajectory and new debates
The first is the possible
challenge posed by a resurgence of biological explanations of gender,
spearheaded by the Darwinist science of evolutionary psychology. Positive evaluations
of women’s talk perpetuate a restrictive, essentialist, gender difference
perspective. A second new direction in the field is a proposal to extend the
well-established concept of ‘communities of practice’ (CofPs; Wenger 2000)
within language and gender research in order to enable an ‘articulation between
the local, the extra-local and the global’ (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2007:
28).
Summing up
Lakoff’s (1975) basic conception
of a unified ‘women’s language’ to today’s elaborate theoretical configurations
of a socially constructed gender. The field has been driven by a dual mission
both to capture ethnographic evidence to argue that gender makes a difference
within many linguistic interactions, and to challenge from a feminist
standpoint the gendered inequalities that are routinely enacted through
language in many contexts.
